Dickinson, Emilyin full Emily Elizabeth Dickinson ( born Dec. 10, 1830 , Amherst, Mass., U.S.—died May 15, 1886 , Amherst ) American lyric poet who has been called “the New England mystic” and who experimented with poetic rhythms and rhymes. Almost all her poetry was published posthumously.Dickinson was the second of three children. The three remained close throughout their adult lives: her younger sister, Lavinia, stayed in the family home and did not marry, and her older brother, Austin, lived in the house next door after his marriage to a friend of Emily’s. Her lived in seclusion and commanded a singular brilliance of style and integrity of vision. With Walt Whitman, Dickinson is widely considered to be one of the two leading 19th-century American poets.

Only 10 of Emily Dickinson’s nearly 1,800 poems are known to have been published in her lifetime. Devoted to private pursuits, she sent hundreds of poems to friends and correspondents while apparently keeping the greater number to herself. She habitually worked in verse forms suggestive of hymns and ballads, with lines of three or four stresses. Her unusual off-rhymes have been seen as both experimental and influenced by the 18th-century hymnist Isaac Watts. She freely ignored the usual rules of versification and even of grammar, and in the intellectual content of her work she likewise proved exceptionally bold and original. Her verse is distinguished by its epigrammatic compression, haunting personal voice, enigmatic brilliance, and lack of high polish.

Early years

The second of three children, Dickinson grew up in moderate privilege and with strong local and religious attachments. For her first nine years she resided in a mansion built by her paternal grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson,

had been one of the founders of Amherst College, and her

who had helped found Amherst College but then went bankrupt shortly before her birth. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a forceful and prosperous Whig lawyer who served as treasurer of the college

from 1835 to 1872. A lawyer who served one term (1853–55) in Congress, Edward Dickinson was an austere and somewhat remote father, but not an unkind one. Emily’s mother, too, was not close to her children.

Emily Dickinson was educated at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Mount Holyoke, which she attended from 1847 to 1848, insisted on religious as well as intellectual growth, and Emily was under considerable pressure to become a professing Christian. She resisted, however, and although many of her poems deal with God, she remained all her life a skeptic. Despite her doubts, she was subject to strong religious feelings, a conflict that lent tension to her writings.

Dickinson began to write verse about 1850, apparently while under the spell of the poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Bronte and under the tutelage of Benjamin F. Newton, a young man studying law in her father’s office. Only a handful of her poems can be dated before 1858, when she began to collect them into small, handsewn booklets. Her letters of the 1850s reveal a vivacious, humorous, somewhat shy young woman. In 1855 Dickinson went

and was elected to one term in Congress. Her mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson, from the leading family in nearby Monson, was an introverted wife and hardworking housekeeper; her letters seem equally inexpressive and quirky. Both parents were loving but austere, and Emily became closely attached to her brother, Austin, and sister, Lavinia. Never marrying, the two sisters remained at home, and when their brother married, he and his wife established their own household next door. The highly distinct and even eccentric personalities developed by the three siblings seem to have mandated strict limits to their intimacy. “If we had come up for the first time from two wells,” Emily once said of Lavinia, “her astonishment would not be greater at some things I say.” Only after the poet’s death did Lavinia and Austin realize how dedicated she was to her art.

As a girl, Emily was seen as frail by her parents and others and was often kept home from school. She attended the coeducational Amherst Academy, where she was recognized by teachers and students alike for her prodigious abilities in composition. She also excelled in other subjects emphasized by the school, most notably Latin and the sciences. A class in botany inspired her to assemble an herbarium containing a large number of pressed plants identified by their Latin names. She was fond of her teachers, but when she left home to attend Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in nearby South Hadley, she found the school’s institutional tone uncongenial. Mount Holyoke’s strict rules and invasive religious practices, along with her own homesickness and growing rebelliousness, help explain why she did not return for a second year.

At home as well as at school and church, the religious faith that ruled the poet’s early years was evangelical Calvinism, a faith centred on the belief that humans are born totally depraved and can be saved only if they undergo a life-altering conversion in which they accept the vicarious sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Questioning this tradition soon after leaving Mount Holyoke, Dickinson was to be the only member of her family who did not experience conversion or join Amherst’s First Congregational Church. Yet she seems to have retained a belief in the soul’s immortality or at least to have transmuted it into a Romantic quest for the transcendent and absolute. One reason her mature religious views elude specification is that she took no interest in creedal or doctrinal definition. In this she was influenced by both the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the mid-century tendencies of liberal Protestant orthodoxy. These influences pushed her toward a more symbolic understanding of religious truth and helped shape her vocation as poet.

Development as a poet

Although Dickinson had begun composing verse by her late teens, few of her early poems are extant. Among them are two of the burlesque “Valentines”—the exuberantly inventive expressions of affection and esteem she sent to friends of her youth. Two other poems dating from the first half of the 1850s draw a contrast between the world as it is and a more peaceful alternative, variously eternity or a serene imaginative order. All her known juvenilia were sent to friends and engage in a striking play of visionary fancies, a direction in which she was encouraged by the popular, sentimental book of essays Reveries of a Bachelor: Or a Book of the Heart by Ik. Marvel (the pseudonym of Donald Grant Mitchell). Dickinson’s acts of fancy and reverie, however, were more intricately social than those of Marvel’s bachelor, uniting the pleasures of solitary mental play, performance for an audience, and intimate communion with another. It may be because her writing began with a strong social impetus that her later solitude did not lead to a meaningless hermeticism.

Until Dickinson was in her mid-20s, her writing mostly took the form of letters, and a surprising number of those that she wrote from age 11 onward have been preserved. Sent to her brother, Austin, or to friends of her own sex, especially Abiah Root, Jane Humphrey, and Susan Gilbert (who would marry Austin), these generous communications overflow with humour, anecdote, invention, and sombre reflection. In general, Dickinson seems to have given and demanded more from her correspondents than she received. On occasion she interpreted her correspondents’ laxity in replying as evidence of neglect or even betrayal. Indeed, the loss of friends, whether through death or cooling interest, became a basic pattern for Dickinson. Much of her writing, both poetic and epistolary, seems premised on a feeling of abandonment and a matching effort to deny, overcome, or reflect on a sense of solitude.

Dickinson’s closest friendships usually had a literary flavour. She was introduced to the poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson by one of her father’s law students, Benjamin F. Newton, and to that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Susan Gilbert and Henry Vaughan Emmons, a gifted college student. Two of Barrett Browning’s works, A Vision of Poets, describing the pantheon of poets, and Aurora Leigh, on the development of a female poet, seem to have played a formative role for Dickinson, validating the idea of female greatness and stimulating her ambition. Though she also corresponded with Josiah G. Holland, a popular writer of the time, he counted for less with her than his appealing wife, Elizabeth, a lifelong friend and the recipient of many affectionate letters.

In 1855 Dickinson traveled to Washington, D.C., with her sister

to visit their

and father, who was

serving in Congress. During the trip they stopped off at Philadelphia, where she heard the preaching of the noted clergyman, the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, who was to become her “dearest earthly friend.” He was something of a romantic figure: a man said to have known great sorrow, whose eloquence in the pulpit contrasted with his solitary broodings. He and Dickinson exchanged letters on spiritual matters, his Calvinist orthodoxy perhaps serving as a useful foil for her own speculative reasoning. She may also have found in his stern, rigorous beliefs a welcome corrective to the easy assumption of a benign universe made by Emerson and the other transcendentalists.

In the 1850s Dickinson began two of her significant correspondences—with Dr. and Mrs. Josiah G. Holland and with Samuel Bowles. The two men were editors of the Springfield Republican, a Massachusetts paper that took an interest in literary matters and even published verse. The correspondence continued over the years, although in the case of the Hollands most of the letters after the 1850s went to Mrs. Holland, an intelligent woman who comprehended Dickinson’s subtleties and witticisms. Dickinson tried to interest Bowles in her poetry, and it was a crushing blow to her that he, a man of quick mind but conventional literary tastes, failed to appreciate it.

By the late 1850s, when she was writing poems at a steadily increasing pace, Dickinson loved a man whom she called “Master” in three drafts of letters. “Master” does not exactly resemble any of her known friends but may have been Bowles or Wadsworth. This love shines forth in several lines from her poems: “I’m ceded—I’ve stopped being Theirs,” “’Tis so much joy! ’Tis so much joy,” and “Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?” to name only a few. Other poems reveal the frustration of this love and its gradual sublimation into a love for Christ and a celestial marriage to him.

The poems of the 1850s are fairly conventional in sentiment and form, but beginning about 1860 they become experimental both in language and prosody, though they owe much to the metres of the English hymn writer Isaac Watts and to Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible. Dickinson’s prevailing poetic form was the quatrain of three iambic feet, a type described in one of the books by Watts in the family library. She used many other forms as well, and to even the simpler hymnbook measures she gave complexity by constantly altering the metrical beat to fit her thought: now slow, now fast, now hesitant. She broke new ground in her wide use of off-rhymes, varying from the true in a variety of ways that also helped to convey her thought and its tensions. In striving for an epigrammatic conciseness, she stripped her language of superfluous words and saw to it that those that remained were vivid and exact. She tampered freely with syntax and liked to place a familiar word in an extraordinary context, shocking the reader to attention and discovery.

On April 15, 1862, Dickinson wrote a letter, enclosing four poems, to a literary man, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, asking whether her poems were “alive.” Higginson, although he advised her not to publish, recognized the originality of her poems and remained her “preceptor” for the rest of her life. After 1862 she resisted all efforts by her friends to put her poems before the public. As a result, only seven poems were published during her lifetime, five of them in the Springfield Republican.

The years of Dickinson’s greatest poetic output, about 800 poems, coincide with the Civil War. Although she looked inward and not to the war for the substance of her poetry, the tense atmosphere of the war years may have contributed to the urgency of her writing. The year of greatest stress was 1862, when distance and danger threatened Dickinson’s friends—Samuel Bowles, in Europe for his health; Charles Wadsworth, who had moved to a new pastorate at the Calvary Church in San Francisco; and T.W. Higginson, serving as an officer in the Union Army. She also had persistent eye trouble, which led her, in 1864 and 1865, to spend several months in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for treatment. Once back in Amherst she never traveled again and after the late 1860s never left the boundaries of the family’s property.

After the Civil War, Dickinson’s poetic tide ebbed, but she sought increasingly to regulate her life by the rules of art. Her letters, some of them equal in artistry to her poems, classicize daily experience in an epigrammatic style. For example, when a friend affronted Dickinson by sending a letter jointly to her and her sister, she replied: “A Mutual plum is not a plum. I was too respectful to take the pulp and do not like a stone.” By 1870 Dickinson dressed only in white and saw few of the callers who came to the homestead; her seclusion was fiercely guarded by her devoted sister. In August 1870 Higginson visited Amherst and described Dickinson as “a little plain woman” with reddish hair, dressed in white, bringing him flowers as her “introduction” and speaking in a “soft frightened breathless childlike voice.”

Her later years were marked with sorrow at the deaths of many people she loved. The most prostrating of these were the deaths of her father in 1874 and her eight-year-old nephew Gilbert in 1883, which occasioned some of her finest letters. She also mourned the loss of Bowles in 1878, Holland in 1881, Charles Wadsworth and her mother in 1882, Otis P. Lord in 1884, and Helen Hunt Jackson in 1885. Lord, a judge from Salem, Massachusetts, with whom Dickinson fell in love about 1878, had been the closest friend of her father. Dickinson’s drafts of letters to Lord reveal a tender, mature love, which Lord returned. Jackson, a poet and popular novelist, discerned the greatness of Dickinson’s poetry and tried unsuccessfully to get her to publish it.

Soon after her death her sister Lavinia determined to have Emily’s poems published. In 1890 Poems by Emily Dickinson, edited by T.W. Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, appeared. Other volumes of Dickinson poems, edited chiefly by Mabel Loomis Todd, Martha Dickinson Bianchi (Emily’s niece), and Millicent Todd Bingham, were published between 1891 and 1957, and in 1955 Thomas H. Johnson edited all the surviving poems and their variant versions.

The subjects of Dickinson’s poems, expressed in intimate, domestic figures of speech, include love, death, and nature. The contrast between her quiet, secluded life in the house in which she was born and died and the depth and intensity of her terse poems has provoked much speculation about her personality and personal relationships. Her 1,775 poems and her letters, which survive in almost as great a number, reveal a passionate, witty woman and a scrupulous craftsman who made an art not only of her poetry but also of her correspondence and her life.

Several excellent bibliographies are available to the student, including Willis J. Buckingham (ed.), Emily Dickinson: An Annotated Bibliography (1970), covering English and foreign-language criticism from 1850 to 1968; Joseph Duchac, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: An Annotated Guide to Commentary Published in English, 1890–1977 (1979), and its supplement, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: An Annotated Guide to Commentary Published in English, 1978–1989 (1993). An invaluable tool for literary study is S.P. Rosenbaum (ed.), A Concordance to the Poems of Emily Dickinson (1964).

Of the biographies, Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson, 2 vol. (1974, reissued in 1 vol., 1994), is still the most revered.

then ending his term as U.S. representative. On the return trip the sisters made an extended stay in Philadelphia, where it is thought the poet heard the preaching of Charles Wadsworth, a fascinating Presbyterian minister whose pulpit oratory suggested (as a colleague put it) “years of conflict and agony.” Seventy years later, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, the poet’s niece, claimed that Emily had fallen in love with Wadsworth, who was married, and then grandly renounced him. The story is too highly coloured for its details to be credited; certainly, there is no evidence the minister returned the poet’s love. Yet it is true that a correspondence arose between the two and that Wadsworth visited her in Amherst about 1860 and again in 1880. After his death in 1882, Dickinson remembered him as “my Philadelphia,” “my dearest earthly friend,” and “my Shepherd from ‘Little Girl’hood.”

Always fastidious, Dickinson began to restrict her social activity in her early 20s, staying home from communal functions and cultivating intense epistolary relationships with a reduced number of correspondents. In 1855, leaving the large and much-loved house (since razed) in which she had lived for 15 years, the 25-year-old woman and her family moved back to the dwelling associated with her first decade: the Dickinson mansion on Main Street in Amherst. Her home for the rest of her life, this large brick house, still standing, has become a favourite destination for her admirers. She found the return profoundly disturbing, and when her mother became incapacitated by a mysterious illness that lasted from 1855 to 1859, both daughters were compelled to give more of themselves to domestic pursuits. Various events outside the home—a bitter Norcross family lawsuit, the financial collapse of the local railroad that had been promoted by the poet’s father, and a powerful religious revival that renewed the pressure to “convert”—made the years 1857 and 1858 deeply troubling for Dickinson and promoted her further withdrawal.

Mature career

In summer 1858, at the height of this period of obscure tension, Dickinson began assembling her manuscript-books. She made clean copies of her poems on fine quality stationery and then sewed small bundles of these sheets together at the fold. Over the next seven years she created 40 such booklets and several unsewn sheaves, and altogether they contained about 800 poems. No doubt she intended to arrange her work in a convenient form, perhaps for her own use in sending poems to friends. Perhaps the assemblage was meant to remain private, like her earlier herbarium. Or perhaps, as implied in a poem of 1863, This is my letter to the world, she anticipated posthumous publication. Because she left no instructions regarding the disposition of her manuscript-books, her ultimate purpose in assembling them can only be conjectured.

Dickinson sent more poems to her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, a cultivated reader, than to any other known correspondent. Repeatedly professing eternal allegiance, these poems often imply that there was a certain distance between the two—that the sister-in-law was felt to be haughty, remote, or even incomprehensible. Yet Susan admired the poetry’s wit and verve and offered the kind of personally attentive audience Dickinson craved. On one occasion, Susan’s dissatisfaction with a poem, Safe in their alabaster chambers, resulted in the drafting of alternative stanzas. Susan was an active hostess, and her home was the venue at which Dickinson met a few friends, most importantly Samuel Bowles, publisher and editor of the influential Springfield Republican. Gregarious, captivating, and unusually liberal on the question of women’s careers, Bowles had a high regard for Dickinson’s poems, publishing (without her consent) seven of them during her lifetime—more than appeared in any other outlet. From 1859 to 1862 she sent him some of her most intense and confidential communications, including the daring poem Title divine is mine, whose speaker proclaims that she is now a “Wife,” but of a highly unconventional type.

In those years Dickinson experienced a painful and obscure personal crisis, partly of a romantic nature. The abject and pleading drafts of her second and third letters to the unidentified person she called “Master” are probably related to her many poems about a loved but distant person, usually male. There has been much speculation about the identity of this individual. One of the first candidates was George Henry Gould, the recipient in 1850 of a prose Valentine from Dickinson. Some have contended that Master was a woman, possibly Kate Scott Anthon or Susan Dickinson. Richard Sewall’s 1974 biography makes the case for Samuel Bowles. All such claims have rested on a partial examination of surviving documents and collateral evidence. Since it is now believed that the earliest draft to Master predates her friendship with Bowles, he cannot have been the person. On balance, Charles Wadsworth and possibly Gould remain the most likely candidates. Whoever the person was, Master’s failure to return Dickinson’s affection—together with Susan’s absorption in her first childbirth and Bowles’s growing invalidism—contributed to a piercing and ultimate sense of distress. In a letter, Dickinson described her lonely suffering as a “terror—since September—[that] I could tell to none.” Instead of succumbing to anguish, however, she came to view it as the sign of a special vocation, and it became the basis of an unprecedented creativity. A poem that seems to register this life-restoring act of resistance begins “The zeroes taught us phosphorus,” meaning that it is in absolute cold and nothingness that true brilliance originates.

Though Dickinson wrote little about the American Civil War, which was then raging, her awareness of its multiplied tragedies seems to have empowered her poetic drive. As she confided to her cousins in Boston, apropos of wartime bereavements, “Every day life feels mightier, and what we have the power to be, more stupendous.” In the hundreds of poems Dickinson composed during the war, a movement can be discerned from the expression of immediate pain or exultation to the celebration of achievement and self-command. Building on her earlier quest for human intimacy and obsession with heaven, she explored the tragic ironies of human desire, such as fulfillment denied, the frustrated search for the absolute within the mundane, and the terrors of internal dissolution. She also articulated a profound sense of female subjectivity, expressing what it means to be subordinate, secondary, or not in control. Yet as the war proceeded, she also wrote with growing frequency about self-reliance, imperviousness, personal triumph, and hard-won liberty. The perfect transcendence she had formerly associated with heaven was now attached to a vision of supreme artistry.

In April 1862, about the time Wadsworth left the East Coast for a pastorate in San Francisco, Dickinson sought the critical advice of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whose witty article of advice to writers, A Letter to a Young Contributor, had just appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. Higginson was known as a writer of delicate nature essays and a crusader for women’s rights. Enclosing four poems, Dickinson asked for his opinion of her verse—whether or not it was “alive.” The ensuing correspondence lasted for years, with the poet sending her “preceptor,” as she called him, many more samples of her work. In addition to seeking an informed critique from a professional but not unsympathetic man of letters, she was reaching out at a time of accentuated loneliness. “You were not aware that you saved my Life,” she confided years later.

Dickinson’s last trips from Amherst were in 1864 and 1865, when she shared her cousins Louisa and Frances Norcross’s boardinghouse in Cambridge and underwent a course of treatment with the leading Boston ophthalmologist. She described her symptoms as an aching in her eyes and a painful sensitivity to light. Of the two posthumous diagnoses, exotropia (a kind of strabismus, the inability of one eye to align with the other) and anterior uveitis (inflammation of the uvea, a part of the iris), the latter seems more likely. In 1869 Higginson invited the poet to Boston to attend a literary salon. The terms she used in declining his invitation—“I do not cross my Father’s ground to any House or town”—make clear her refusal by that time to leave home and also reveal her sense of paternal order. When Higginson visited her the next year, he recorded his vivid first impression of her “plain” features, “exquisitely” neat attire, “childlike” manner, and loquacious and exhausting brilliance. He was “glad not to live near her.”

In her last 15 years Dickinson averaged 35 poems a year and conducted her social life mainly through her chiselled and often sibylline written messages. Her father’s sudden death in 1874 caused a profound and persisting emotional upheaval yet eventually led to a greater openness, self-possession, and serenity. She repaired an 11-year breach with Samuel Bowles and made friends with Maria Whitney, a teacher of modern languages at Smith College, and Helen Hunt Jackson, poet and author of the novel Ramona (1884). Dickinson resumed contact with Wadsworth, and from about age 50 she conducted a passionate romance with Otis Phillips Lord, an elderly judge on the supreme court of Massachusetts. The letters she apparently sent Lord reveal her at her most playful, alternately teasing and confiding. In declining an erotic advance or his proposal of marriage, she asked, “Dont you know you are happiest while I withhold and not confer—dont you know that ‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to Language?”

After Dickinson’s aging mother was incapacitated by a stroke and a broken hip, caring for her at home made large demands on the poet’s time and patience. After her mother died in 1882, Dickinson summed up the relationship in a confidential letter to her Norcross cousins: “We were never intimate Mother and Children while she was our Mother—but…when she became our Child, the Affection came.” The deaths of Dickinson’s friends in her last years—Bowles in 1878, Wadsworth in 1882, Lord in 1884, and Jackson in 1885—left her feeling terminally alone. But the single most shattering death, occurring in 1883, was that of her eight-year-old nephew next door, the gifted and charming Gilbert Dickinson. Her health broken by this culminating tragedy, she ceased seeing almost everyone, apparently including her sister-in-law. The poet died in 1886, when she was 55 years old. The immediate cause of death was a stroke. The attending physician attributed this to Bright’s disease, but a modern posthumous diagnosis points to severe primary hypertension as the underlying condition.

Assessment

Dickinson’s exact wishes regarding the publication of her poetry are in dispute. When Lavinia found the manuscript-books, she decided the poems should be made public and asked Susan to prepare an edition. Susan failed to move the project forward, however, and after two years Lavinia turned the manuscript-books over to Mabel Loomis Todd, a local family friend, who energetically transcribed and selected the poems and also enlisted the aid of Thomas Wentworth Higginson in editing. A complicating circumstance was that Todd was conducting an affair with Susan’s husband, Austin. When Poems by Emily Dickinson appeared in 1890, it drew widespread interest and a warm welcome from the eminent American novelist and critic William Dean Howells, who saw the verse as a signal expression of a distinctively American sensibility. But Susan, who was well aware of her husband’s ongoing affair with Todd, was outraged at what she perceived as Lavinia’s betrayal and Todd’s effrontery. The enmity between Susan and Todd, and later between their daughters, Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Millicent Todd Bingham (each of whom edited selections of Dickinson’s work), had a pernicious effect on the presentation of Emily Dickinson’s work. Her poetic manuscripts are divided between two primary collections: the poems in Bingham’s possession went to Amherst College Library, and those in Bianchi’s hands to Harvard University’s Houghton Library. The acrimonious relationship between the two families has affected scholarly interpretation of Dickinson’s work into the 21st century.

In editing Dickinson’s poems in the 1890s, Todd and Higginson invented titles and regularized diction, grammar, metre, and rhyme. The first scholarly editions of Dickinson’s poems and letters, by Thomas H. Johnson, did not appear until the 1950s. A much improved edition of the complete poems was brought out in 1998 by R.W. Franklin. A reliable edition of the letters is not yet available.

In spite of her "modernism," Dickinson’s verse drew little interest from the first generation of “High Modernists.” Hart Crane and Allen Tate were among the first leading writers to register her greatness, followed in the 1950s by Elizabeth Bishop and others. The New Critics also played an important role in establishing her place in the modern canon. From the beginning, however, Dickinson has strongly appealed to many ordinary or unschooled readers. Her unmistakable voice, private yet forthright—"I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you—Nobody—too?"—establishes an immediate connection. Readers respond, too, to the impression her poems convey of a haunting private life, one marked by extremes of deprivation and refined ecstasies. At the same time, her rich abundance—her great range of feeling, her supple expressiveness—testifies to an intrinsic poetic genius. Widely translated into Japanese, Italian, French, German, and many other languages, Dickinson has begun to strike readers as the one American lyric poet who belongs in the pantheon with Sappho, Catullus, Saʿdī, the Shakespeare of the sonnets, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Arthur Rimbaud.

Editions

The standard edition of the poems is the three-volume variorum edition, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition (1998), edited by R.W. Franklin. He also edited a two-volume work, The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (1981), which provides facsimiles of the poems in their original groupings. The Letters of Emily Dickinson, in three volumes edited by Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward (1958), was reissued in one volume in 1986, and it is still the standard source for the poet’s letters. Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (1998), edited by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith, is a selection of the poet’s correspondence with her sister-in-law. Facsimiles of the letters to “Master” and Otis Phillips Lord are presented in The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson (1986), edited by R.W. Franklin, and Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing (1995), edited by Marta L. Werner. Emily Dickinson’s Reception in the 1890s: A Documentary History (1989), edited by Willis J. Buckingham, reprints all known reviews from the first decade of publication.

Biographies

Jay Leyda,The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, 2 vol. (1960, reissued 1970), is a

day-by-day guidebook

chronological compilation of brief documentary materials relating to the poet’s life.

Cynthia Griffin Wolff,

Richard Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (

1986), while controversial for its psychological interpretations of the poet, provides extensive new research on the cultural backgrounds of Dickinson’s life and poetry. A good short introduction to the poet is Donna Dickenson, Emily Dickinson (1985).Critical studies are many and varied. A useful thematic overview of the poems is

1974, 1980; reprinted 1994), is an encyclopaedic survey drawing on the poet’s published letters, the papers of Mabel Loomis Todd, and Leyda’s book. Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson, 2nd ed. (2002), based on new research, traces the growth of Dickinson’s mind and poetic vocation in the context of her relationships and her economic, religious, and literary affiliations.

. Barton Levi St. Armand, Emily Dickinson and Her Culture: The Soul’s Society (1984), takes a highly interdisciplinary approach to show Dickinson’s engagement with the high and popular culture of her time. Suzanne Juhasz, The Undiscovered Continent: Emily Dickinson and the Space of the Mind (1983), examines Dickinson’s choice of solitude as a means of poetic empowerment. Vivian R. Pollak, Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender (1984), explores the poet’s struggle with her place in literary history as a woman poet

, offers perceptive traditional readings of Dickinson’s poems. Two discerning treatments of her linguistic and rhetorical practices are Brita Lindberg-Seyersted, The Voice of the Poet: Aspects of Style in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson (1968); and Cristanne Miller, Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (1987). James McIntosh, Nimble Believing: Dickinson and the Unknown (2000), discusses the poems’ complex religious elements. Wendy Barker, Lunacy of Light: Emily Dickinson and the Experience of Metaphor (1987), applies a feminist perspective to illuminate patterns of figurative language in Dickinson’s poetry. Suzanne Juhasz, Cristanne Miller, and Martha Nell Smith, Comic Power in Emily Dickinson (1993),

counters

explores the

traditional idea of Dickinson as a primarily tragic poet.

Since the publication of the fascicle manuscripts, Dickinson’s language, style, and manuscript production have received a great deal of critical attention. Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (1985), while itself stylistically unorthodox, provides an important analysis of changes in meaning that result from converting Dickinson’s idiosyncratic manuscript poems to printed form. Studies of possible patterns in the organization of the fascicles include Sharon Cameron, Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles (1992); and Dorothy Huff Oberhaus, Emily Dickinson’s Fascicles: Method & Meaning (1995), which explores the fascicles in the context of their multiple biblical references. Cristanne Miller, Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (1987), is a sophisticated analysis of the poet’s compressed and disjunctive rhetoric.

Useful critical collections include Caesar R. Blake and Carlton F. Wells (eds.), The Recognition of Emily Dickinson: Selected Criticism Since 1890 (1964), which anthologizes chronologically the milestones in Dickinson’s changing critical reception; Willis J. Buckingham (ed.), Emily Dickinson’s Reception in the 1890s: A Documentary History (1989), focusing on the decade in which the bulk of her poems were first published; Martin Orzeck and Robert Weisbuch (eds.), Dickinson and Audience (1996), exploring the poet’s relationship with the public, both in her letters and in her poetry; and Judith Farr (ed.), Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays (1996), which gathers classic essays on Dickinson as well as representative newer work on a variety of issues

vein of comedy in her work. Domhnall Mitchell, Measures of Possibility: Emily Dickinson’s Manuscripts (2005), offers a scrupulous assessment of recent theories of the manuscript school of critical interpretation (which argues that the printing of the poems should follow the exact lineation of Dickinson’s manuscripts, even when lines were broken simply because she had reached the edge of the page).